Limiting carbon emissions is harder when you’re conserving water

Drought-prone states might run up against water limits while cutting carbon.

In the US, fully half of the water withdrawn from sources such as lakes and aquifers ends up being used for generating electricity. Most of that water is converted to steam, cooled, and returned to its original source. Even in those cases, however, losses during the cooling process reduce the total amount of water available.

The end result is that electricity generation competes with other potential uses for the water. In cases of severe drought, power generation may end up losing, reducing the amount of electricity we can generate. This situation is a problem given that climate change is expected to exacerbate droughts in a number of regions of the US.

To find out how much of a problem this can be, three MIT researchers have looked into the balance between water use and carbon emissions, using the Texas power grid as their test tube. Their model shows that taking carbon emissions into account is bad news for coal, but limiting water use essentially forces coal off the grid. While nuclear looks great for limiting carbon emissions, its heavy water requirements cut down on its role when both factors are considered.

Currently, most US facilities use what are called open-loop or once-through cooling. In these systems, water is removed from a source, used for energy generation (e.g., heated and used as steam), and then cooled and returned to the original source at a higher temperature. Although a majority of the water is immediately put back into circulation, these systems have a fairly high rate of loss.

There are a number of alternative approaches that require far less water to be extracted. The simplest is closed-loop, which passively cools the water in the facility and uses it again. Dry cooling, which uses air to actively cool the water, requires more in the way of both up-front construction costs and ongoing operating costs. Hybrid systems use both of these approaches, but they have even larger up-front costs. All of them require periodic withdrawals of water due to losses, but they end up requiring far less to be withdrawn for a given period of activity than an open-loop system would.

Different types of energy production can use the different technologies to various degrees. For example, natural gas can be used to heat water in a traditional boiler plant, or the hot exhaust gasses can be used to drive turbines directly, significantly limiting the amount of water involved. Current nuclear plants have cooling towers designed to lower the water's temperature before returning it to the environment; these could instead be merged with air cooling to create hybrid, closed-loop cooling systems.

The authors considered the Texas grid of 2050 since all existing generating capacity would be expected to be replaced by then anyway, allowing them to work with a blank canvas (albeit one with a larger electricity demand than the present). They considered three different scenarios: business as usual, a 75 percent reduction of carbon emissions, and the same 75 percent emissions reduction coupled to a 50 percent reduction in water used while generating electricity.

With no restrictions, the grid of 2050 looks a lot like it does today: mostly coal and natural gas, with a healthy chunk of nuclear. In fact, because the authors seem to be looking only at costs largely as they exist in the near future, wind is largely left out of this scenario, even though it already accounts for a substantial fraction of Texas' generating capacity. In fact, even with heavy carbon restrictions, the percentage of wind barely budges—instead, most of the coal is displaced by nuclear. Photovoltaics are effectively missing.

(If this seems unreasonable to you, it does to us as well—more on that in a moment.)

Adding water limits turns the whole thing upside down. Nuclear power use drops dramatically, and most of the remaining generation capacity is linked to a hybrid closed-loop system despite their high costs. The vast majority of electricity is generated by some form of natural gas, most of which doesn't use water at all. Here, wind finally makes an appearance, although only at five percent of the total capacity. Even though, like wind, photovoltaics use no water to generate their electricity, they have almost no presence in this scenario.

Is any of this realistic? Not entirely. Nuclear plants require huge capital outlays for years before they generate power; in an era of cheap natural gas, we're not likely to see many being constructed. And the authors found essentially no presence of wind systems, while Texas is already seeing times where wind is approaching 30 percent of the electricity feeding into the grid—and the Department of Energy is expecting the cost of installing wind systems to drop further in the upcoming years.

All of which suggests that there is something seriously amiss with the economic assumptions in the authors' model.

Nevertheless, the study highlights a real challenge. Texas recently experienced its worst drought on record, and climate change is expected to put a strain on the water supply of several regions in the US. The prospect of a competition between electricity and other water uses—or an actual shortage of water for generation purposes—isn't out of the question in the coming decades. Any plans for making the US energy economy sustainable had better consider it, which will hopefully motivate a more detailed look at the challenge.

Know this is far easier said than done, but perhaps it would be worthwhile to look into ways to capture and harness the "waste heat" that is part of the process. Not only is a sizable amount of energy being lost, but returning water that is warmer than before can have ecological consequences via thermal pollution.

Possibly only a problem due to not being native speaker, but I presume that I ought to read it as "heavy (water requirements)"and not "(heavy water) requirements"as I'd guess that not many nuclear plants in the west today is using heavy water as moderator, right?

Water requirement problem depends where you are situated. I am not sure to understand why this report calculates global water requirement without taking account where it is needed. A heavy request of water in Amarillo is not the same as on the coast where basically there is all the Atlantic to cool your reactor. And electricity can be moved over. So I do not understand this report if it does not take into account the location of the generators. Is this report simply BS by a lobby, or did I miss the point ?

Edit : OK let's limit the extent of cooling water to the Gulf of Mexico. Still, that's a nice water mass.

Possibly only a problem due to not being native speaker, but I presume that I ought to read it as "heavy (water requirements)"and not "(heavy water) requirements"as I'd guess that not many nuclear plants in the west today is using heavy water as moderator, right?

Another solution (due to using HVAC for transmission) would be to move the power generation to places where they have more than enough water to provide cooling and just send the power to where it's needed.

But that would just be silly and mean they didn't have a paper to write.

There appear to be some huge misunderstandings in this article, and if they came from the report, then it is probably nonsense.

In steam plants (regardless of whether fossil-fueled or nuclear, and including hybrid gas turbine/steam plants), the steam used to turn the turbines is always condensed and returned to the boilers, with only small losses.

The cooling required for this condensation is always done with water. Generating plants next to large bodies of water use that water to do the cooling, and return it without loss. This is an open-cycle process.

Plants without this option have to transfer the heat from the condenser cooling water to the air, so that the water can be re-used. That is what happens in the cooling towers of the picture. Inside, the warm condenser-cooling water (not the condensed steam, which is returned to the boiler) is sprayed into the air, so that it is cooled by evaporation as well as by conduction. This evaporation is where most of the water loss occurs.

It would be possible to cool this water without losses, by conduction alone, using a sort of giant car radiator, but this would be expensive to construct, so it is generally not done (I am not aware of any examples, but there may be some in landlocked near-desert regions.) Furthermore (and this may be what the authors are getting at), in this approach, the air temperature is the theoretical limit of cooling, while evaporative cooling can take the temperature lower, if the incoming air is not saturated. Raising this temperature raises the temperature in the condenser, and so reduces the thermodynamic efficiency of the plant (see Carnot Cycle). I cannot tell if this is what the authors are basing their claim on, or if they mistakenly assume that the steam turbine exhaust is vented to the atmosphere.

With regard to nuclear power, the standard design of PWR does not use heavy water, and no reactor design uses heavy water in a lossy way (see CANDU). With regard to water loss, the situation is the same as any other steam plant, except that, because of the lower turbine inlet temperature, raising the condenser temperature has a proportionally greater effect on the thermodynamic efficiency. On the other hand, inefficiencies in nuclear plants do not contribute to greenhouse gases.

I don't know what to make of the comment about using exhaust gases to drive turbines (the exhaust from a boiler is utterly unsuited to this task), unless this is a garbled reference to the idea of using the exhaust from gas turbines to generate steam. Even if it does, I don't see what this has to do with water loss.

Could the report be talking about base load, of which neither wind or solar are very good at due to their storage requirements for when it's dark and/or not windy?

"Base Load" is an outdated concept that only applies to nuclear and older coal designs that cannot run at variable outputs. When an old coal plant took 4 hours to bring up and cost 1/4 of what a gas turbine did to run it was a meaningful concept. Today 'base load' is a weakness in design for these facilities. Electricity prices in the market nodes near the Comanche Peak nuclear plant go negative nightly during mild periods in spring and fall because that facility can only produce exactly 4MW, and it is easier for them to pay users to take electricity than to moderate their generation.

This paper definitely uses outdated economic assumptions. Even DOE's 2011 assumptions, which include a very low capacity factor for wind, show wind as a more economical source for electricity than coal or natural gas combustion turbines (the low water natural gas option) today:

This analysis follows behind similar papers that fail to consider the economic reality of renewables that exists now. They will often project a cost for wind or solar in 2020-2030 that is higher then what costs are for current projects

The joke of this paper is it projects renewable penetration lower that exists right now! Are they projecting the wind turbines will get taken down? Let alone the gigawatts of existing projects being built?

The age of our Nuclear and Coal fleet is a major factor and new plants are going to be created based on cost of new generation and need to fill in. As coal is likely to continue to have a CCS requirement that's straight out. Nuclear is already failing to be built without onerous price guarantees. Look at Georgia or Hinkley C in the UK, essentially Solar and Wind are both cheaper then new nuclear and coal.

Natural gas and wind / solar are not mutually exclusive. In fact just the opposite, due to Nat Gas's ability to ramp to load it will be a key part of our grid for the foreseeable future. But the economics will continue to drive the situation and I think many people will be surprised at where that puts us in 5-15 years.

The opinion of the average Citizen regarding climate change and their desire to change business as usual and get behind more significant changes is likely to be affected by ENSO impact.

Wind and solar are probably being ignored because they're not particularly useful for large-scale power generation since their output is variable, unless you want to have coal or gas plants backing them up. Nuclear plants are the only environmentally friendly replacement for coal and gas, since it can provide stable, consistent power. Unfortunately, nuclear plants can't change their power output quickly like coal and gas plants can, which means your nuclear plants need to be able to handle almost 100% of the load (and you can't just lower the output during the day and turn them back up during the night, since it takes nuclear plants several days to do this). The good news is that fuel isn't the expensive part of nuclear plants, so you might as well use them for 100% of the load anyway.

To see a real-world example of this, take a look at Germany, where somewhere around 12% of their power is from wind and solar, but they have the most expensive energy prices in Europe, *and* they're needing to build more coal plants to make it work.

So yes, we could use more wind power, but only if we stay with coal and gas plants, which kind of defeats the purpose.

If one would like to keep carbon emissions down and conserve water, perhaps these companies should look into some technology that stoners have been using for quite a while.

An internally-finned rotary chamber filled with a tiny amount of water which is agitated in a spiral motion acts as a great carbon capture mechanism. The filtration method conserves water while increasing the effective filtration rate.

Of course, spinning smoke stack towers might pose a bit of an engineering feat. I can say with certainty that it does work on a small scale.

The cooling required for this condensation is always done with water. Generating plants next to large bodies of water use that water to do the cooling, and return it without loss. This is an open-cycle process.

Even if all the cooling water is returned, the fact that it has a higher temperature means it increases evaporation from the body of water.

This is approximately the same effect as if you would cool the water for reuse using evaporation instead, since the same amount of heat is being dumped into evaporation. However, evaporation is non-linear with temperature, so I'm not sure how the amount of water lost to atmosphere may compare.

Could the report be talking about base load, of which neither wind or solar are very good at due to their storage requirements for when it's dark and/or not windy?

This is the elephant in the room most solar/wind advocates love to ignore. For a power source to be a viable option to replace fossil fuel it needs to be able to generate power 24/7. Solar and wind have zero chance of doing this right now. Solar has a good chance of doing this in the near future IF plans for building orbital solar power stations go forward. For terrestrially based power generation solar and wind are a joke. Geothermal and hydroelectric are the only real renewable power sources that can produce power on the same or close to the same level as traditional power generation.

You know what's funny.... The ignore user feature? I only use it to ignore crazy (or ignorant? or paid shills?) users in climate change topics. The only topics in which I see this:

Quote:

Display 1 ignored posts

Are climate change topics. This topic is just getting started. The last one had a dozen ignored posts.

There is a small number of users here, attempting to derail every climate topic, and they don't usually post comments to other stories.

How about we run stats, and if this is true and not just my imagination, we ban their IP blocks?

So you are one of these people who think using C4 to deal with a simple mouse problem in your home is a great idea. I don't get what's worse. That you don't see the massive problem with your suggestion or that you wish to shut up those you don't agree with?

Another solution (due to using HVAC for transmission) would be to move the power generation to places where they have more than enough water to provide cooling and just send the power to where it's needed.

But that would just be silly and mean they didn't have a paper to write.

From my observations, real estate values are typically higher along large bodies of water as well as more densely populated. I doubt the people living in the areas that could use the generated power most efficiently would ever allow nuclear to be built anywhere near an urban area. Hell, it's damn near impossible to get a liquor license in my town.

Could the report be talking about base load, of which neither wind or solar are very good at due to their storage requirements for when it's dark and/or not windy?

This is the elephant in the room most solar/wind advocates love to ignore. For a power source to be a viable option to replace fossil fuel it needs to be able to generate power 24/7. Solar and wind have zero chance of doing this right now.

That's actually not true. Solar and wind can be used for peak shaving, which eliminates the need to activate fossil fuel plants during hours of peak demand. And good forecasts and rapid response allow them to displace a fraction of baseline power supplies. As a result, wind has been a factor in the US' decreased reliance on coal, and its lower carbon emissions.

Another solution (due to using HVAC for transmission) would be to move the power generation to places where they have more than enough water to provide cooling and just send the power to where it's needed.

But that would just be silly and mean they didn't have a paper to write.

From my observations, real estate values are typically higher along large bodies of water as well as more densely populated. I doubt the people living in the areas that could use the generated power most efficiently would ever allow nuclear to be built anywhere near an urban area. Hell, it's damn near impossible to get a liquor license in my town.

It will be interesting to see if people view fusion power plants differently when they are viable.

Could the report be talking about base load, of which neither wind or solar are very good at due to their storage requirements for when it's dark and/or not windy?

"Base Load" is an outdated concept that only applies to nuclear and older coal designs that cannot run at variable outputs. When an old coal plant took 4 hours to bring up and cost 1/4 of what a gas turbine did to run it was a meaningful concept. Today 'base load' is a weakness in design for these facilities. Electricity prices in the market nodes near the Comanche Peak nuclear plant go negative nightly during mild periods in spring and fall because that facility can only produce exactly 4MW, and it is easier for them to pay users to take electricity than to moderate their generation.

This paper definitely uses outdated economic assumptions. Even DOE's 2011 assumptions, which include a very low capacity factor for wind, show wind as a more economical source for electricity than coal or natural gas combustion turbines (the low water natural gas option) today:

Base load is the amount of electricity you need to supply to power the things that are on all of the time - e.g. fridges, freezers, servers, life support machines, AC in the summer and heating in the winter. Some of these things may change over time however when they are changed it's because they're been replaced by something else (e.g. computers in offices are turned off, and about 1 hour later TV's at home are turned on). All other sources power draw are variable load and typically require plants to cycle up and down.

Currently Nuclear energy is the best for providing a stable base load at a predictable price followed by coal (although coal usually comes in cheaper). Variable load is usually provided by pumped storage, gas turbines and renewables.

Could the report be talking about base load, of which neither wind or solar are very good at due to their storage requirements for when it's dark and/or not windy?

This is the elephant in the room most solar/wind advocates love to ignore. For a power source to be a viable option to replace fossil fuel it needs to be able to generate power 24/7. Solar and wind have zero chance of doing this right now.

That's actually not true. Solar and wind can be used for peak shaving, which eliminates the need to activate fossil fuel plants during hours of peak demand. And good forecasts and rapid response allow them to displace a fraction of baseline power supplies. As a result, wind has been a factor in the US' decreased reliance on coal, and its lower carbon emissions.

(NB: not the only factor, but a factor).

Solar and Wind power generation are intermittent. No way to get around that fact. They do not and cannot generate large amounts of power 24/7. Solar and wind in their current incarnations are at best supplemental sources of power. And even then not all that great. They have no chance of replacing traditional power generation as they stand now. As I said before, of the two only Solar has a shot at becoming a primary source of power IF plans for building orbiting solar power stations go forward.

Could the report be talking about base load, of which neither wind or solar are very good at due to their storage requirements for when it's dark and/or not windy?

This is the elephant in the room most solar/wind advocates love to ignore. For a power source to be a viable option to replace fossil fuel it needs to be able to generate power 24/7. Solar and wind have zero chance of doing this right now.

That's actually not true. Solar and wind can be used for peak shaving, which eliminates the need to activate fossil fuel plants during hours of peak demand. And good forecasts and rapid response allow them to displace a fraction of baseline power supplies. As a result, wind has been a factor in the US' decreased reliance on coal, and its lower carbon emissions.

(NB: not the only factor, but a factor).

On the other side of that coin, in Germany it is also the reason that energy operators are threatening to shut down coal power stations that are becoming uneconomical to run, while still being needed for base load.

Could the report be talking about base load, of which neither wind or solar are very good at due to their storage requirements for when it's dark and/or not windy?

This is the elephant in the room most solar/wind advocates love to ignore. For a power source to be a viable option to replace fossil fuel it needs to be able to generate power 24/7. Solar and wind have zero chance of doing this right now.

That's actually not true. Solar and wind can be used for peak shaving, which eliminates the need to activate fossil fuel plants during hours of peak demand. And good forecasts and rapid response allow them to displace a fraction of baseline power supplies. As a result, wind has been a factor in the US' decreased reliance on coal, and its lower carbon emissions.

(NB: not the only factor, but a factor).

Solar and Wind power generation are intermittent. No way to get around that fact. They do not and cannot generate large amounts of power 24/7. Solar and wind in their current incarnations are at best supplemental sources of power. And even then not all that great. They have no chance of replacing traditional power generation as they stand now. As I said before, of the two only Solar has a shot at becoming a primary source of power IF plans for building orbiting solar power stations go forward.

Solar and wind don't need orbital power generation, you could quiet reasonably set up solar stations ringing the equator that would provide most of the worlds current energy needs as long as you can set up the infrastructure and treaties to govern costs and ownership. The same is true of wind power. The difficulty with both of those is that it needs international cooperation to work and would leave everyone relying on some politically unstable regions of the world for power security.

Another solution (due to using HVAC for transmission) would be to move the power generation to places where they have more than enough water to provide cooling and just send the power to where it's needed.

But that would just be silly and mean they didn't have a paper to write.

From my observations, real estate values are typically higher along large bodies of water as well as more densely populated. I doubt the people living in the areas that could use the generated power most efficiently would ever allow nuclear to be built anywhere near an urban area. Hell, it's damn near impossible to get a liquor license in my town.

It will be interesting to see if people view fusion power plants differently when they are viable.

I agree. I think right now, your average homeowner either grew up or was already an adult who lived under the threat of a doomsday clock on the news and might have a different outlook on these types of things. It might take a bit longer than I would hope.

Could the report be talking about base load, of which neither wind or solar are very good at due to their storage requirements for when it's dark and/or not windy?

This is the elephant in the room most solar/wind advocates love to ignore. For a power source to be a viable option to replace fossil fuel it needs to be able to generate power 24/7. Solar and wind have zero chance of doing this right now.

That's actually not true. Solar and wind can be used for peak shaving, which eliminates the need to activate fossil fuel plants during hours of peak demand. And good forecasts and rapid response allow them to displace a fraction of baseline power supplies. As a result, wind has been a factor in the US' decreased reliance on coal, and its lower carbon emissions.

(NB: not the only factor, but a factor).

Solar and Wind power generation are intermittent. No way to get around that fact. They do not and cannot generate large amounts of power 24/7. Solar and wind in their current incarnations are at best supplemental sources of power. And even then not all that great. They have no chance of replacing traditional power generation as they stand now. As I said before, of the two only Solar has a shot at becoming a primary source of power IF plans for building orbiting solar power stations go forward.

Solar and wind don't need orbital power generation, you could quiet reasonably set up solar stations ringing the equator that would provide most of the worlds current energy needs as long as you can set up the infrastructure and treaties to govern costs and ownership. The same is true of wind power. The difficulty with both of those is that it needs international cooperation to work and would leave everyone relying on some politically unstable regions of the world for power security.

Only one problem with your idea. Physics. When you transmit power along wires long distances you lose power to friction and other things. You can do a simple experiment in your own home to see what I mean. Anyway, for the sake of argument let's say this is easily done. You then run into geopolitical issues. Since we are not a united world there would be arguing and fighting over the system. A far better option is nuclear power. It has a VERY good track record. It's been in use since the mid 50's and only 2 power plants actually managed to meltdown and one of them was expected given its poor design was intentional and it in no way was representative of the average nuclear power plant. Plus the amount of nuclear waste generated by all of the nuclear power plants that have ever existed to this day wouldn't even fill a high school gymnasium. People have an irrational fear of nuclear power.

I was disputing the "no way to get around that fact", not that better solutions may or may not be available in any particular circumstance.

[Though I'll point out, from the article you cited: "Solar panels take a lot more energy to produce, so preventing the waste of that invested energy pays off, even if it's done with a low-energy payback using batteries."]

Could the report be talking about base load, of which neither wind or solar are very good at due to their storage requirements for when it's dark and/or not windy?

This is the elephant in the room most solar/wind advocates love to ignore. For a power source to be a viable option to replace fossil fuel it needs to be able to generate power 24/7. Solar and wind have zero chance of doing this right now. Solar has a good chance of doing this in the near future IF plans for building orbital solar power stations go forward. For terrestrially based power generation solar and wind are a joke. Geothermal and hydroelectric are the only real renewable power sources that can produce power on the same or close to the same level as traditional power generation.

You must have missed stored thermal solar plants, it's fairly easy to use concentrated solar to heat a molten salt and then store that salt with around 1% per hour loss. The heat from the salt is then used to drive the turbine when the sun isn't shining.

I think it is important to point out that while CURRENTLY deployed Nuclear technologies are heavily water dependent, there is a concept of a high-temperature gas cooled reactor, which can be designed to use air cooling for the final heat sink (air isn't run through the reactor or power systems in any way, so it would never come into contact with radioactivity - instead, a primary coolant in a sealed, closed loop, is run through the reactor, which might be a molten salt, or an intert gas such as helium or CO2, then that primary coolant is run through a heat exchanger to heat up a working fluid [again, a gas - probably CO2 to use a super-critical CO2 generator, which are very small and highly efficient], then after running through the power turbine, the secondary coolant would be run through another heat exchanger to exchange heat with the outside air).

Such systems would use no water, if I understand correctly, and may be cost competitive, it is believed, because of several factors, one of which is that because they are running at a higher input temperature, because of Carnot's Theorem, they don't need to cool off the working fluid to as low a temperature on the "cold" side of the turbine, but they can still get higher overall system efficiency. In fact, there are some proposals that the high-ish temperature waste heat from an HTGR (High Temp Gas-cooled Reactor), because it can be high enough to boil water, be used to desalinate sea water in an on-site desal plant to provide municipal and agricultural fresh water.

I think this will, in fact, be the future of nuclear power in places where fresh water is scarce. I suspect that plants along major bodies of water will be HTGRs, but still just use once-through water cooling, in places like the Great Lakes states, states along the Mississippi river, etc, where there is never a shortage of fresh water, just because it will probably be a bit cheaper; but in most other states, where fresh water is a more limited resources, they'll probably use air-cooled HTGRs.

Edit: link to an article from an engineer, about Supercritical CO2 power turbines, with a fantastic slide showing the enormous difference in size between a Supercritical CO2 turbine, and a conventional steam turbine. That difference in size, I suspect, also means a rather dramatic difference in capital costs:

You must have missed stored thermal solar plants, it's fairly easy to use concentrated solar to heat a molten salt and then store that salt with around 1% per hour loss. The heat from the salt is then used to drive the turbine when the sun isn't shining.

Whatever happened to the pilot plant (I think it was in Arizona)? There was a brief burst of news about it and then... nothing.

Another solution (due to using HVAC for transmission) would be to move the power generation to places where they have more than enough water to provide cooling and just send the power to where it's needed.

But that would just be silly and mean they didn't have a paper to write.

From my observations, real estate values are typically higher along large bodies of water as well as more densely populated. I doubt the people living in the areas that could use the generated power most efficiently would ever allow nuclear to be built anywhere near an urban area. Hell, it's damn near impossible to get a liquor license in my town.

It will be interesting to see if people view fusion power plants differently when they are viable.

No it wont.

It will be an evil dragon, like nuclear fission is today. We should hide in our huts and call the town wizard!

Not even waving a dead chicken over a tombstone will protect you from the evil magic of fission.

You don't want to use that evil magic because those other guys perched theirs on the banks of a tsunami/typhoon/earthquake zone right up against the ocean like some dipshits did*, so obviously, if we do that, we'll obviously want to plant ours right on the San Andreas fault next to an elementary school and paid for by the Koch brothers.

or something.

*so the Japanese put their reactor in the line of fire of earthquake/tsunami/typhoons - and therefore, the Germans take theirs off line because Fukushima? What. The. Fuuuu? What happened to the rational, reasonable Germans?

Could the report be talking about base load, of which neither wind or solar are very good at due to their storage requirements for when it's dark and/or not windy?

This is the elephant in the room most solar/wind advocates love to ignore. For a power source to be a viable option to replace fossil fuel it needs to be able to generate power 24/7. Solar and wind have zero chance of doing this right now. Solar has a good chance of doing this in the near future IF plans for building orbital solar power stations go forward. For terrestrially based power generation solar and wind are a joke. Geothermal and hydroelectric are the only real renewable power sources that can produce power on the same or close to the same level as traditional power generation.

You must have missed stored thermal solar plants, it's fairly easy to use concentrated solar to heat a molten salt and then store that salt with around 1% per hour loss. The heat from the salt is then used to drive the turbine when the sun isn't shining.

its not very easy to concentrate solar heat in Wales or Seattle when its raining all day long.

But you can put in a 100% safe pebble bed or thorium reactor in except Evil Nucular dragons kill villagers!

Did they consider alternatives for nuclear, like newer (more efficient) designs and reducing the rather asinine regulatory load (nuke plants can be killed several times during the construction process, unlike other power production designs which can only be cancelled once)?

If not, yet another problem with this paper.

The are several interesting developments in nuclear power, but due to the bureaucratic environment in the US we're still building to essentially decades-old designs.

Could the report be talking about base load, of which neither wind or solar are very good at due to their storage requirements for when it's dark and/or not windy?

This is the elephant in the room most solar/wind advocates love to ignore. For a power source to be a viable option to replace fossil fuel it needs to be able to generate power 24/7. Solar and wind have zero chance of doing this right now. Solar has a good chance of doing this in the near future IF plans for building orbital solar power stations go forward. For terrestrially based power generation solar and wind are a joke. Geothermal and hydroelectric are the only real renewable power sources that can produce power on the same or close to the same level as traditional power generation.

You must have missed stored thermal solar plants, it's fairly easy to use concentrated solar to heat a molten salt and then store that salt with around 1% per hour loss. The heat from the salt is then used to drive the turbine when the sun isn't shining.

its not very easy to concentrate solar heat in Wales or Seattle when its raining all day long.

But you can put in a 100% safe pebble bed or thorium reactor in except Evil Nucular dragons kill villagers!

Why would you put it in Seattle? Put it in Yakima where it will produce 25% more power and cost 1/50th the capital to acquire the land.